


After That Long Kiss

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Post-Canon, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-16
Updated: 2011-12-16
Packaged: 2017-10-27 10:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/294508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years later, Odo comes home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After That Long Kiss

**Author's Note:**

> Written for lesliecrusher on tumblr, who finished her papers for the semester, and because I am a soft-heart living vicariously through everyone else in school. Title and quote below from James Joyce.

_16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is_

*

She knows without opening her eyes that he’s there, somewhere, maybe even everywhere in the room. Odo is a specter in the half-darkness, a shadow on the wall, a flash of color at the corner of her eyes when she opens them. And all of it so familiar that Nerys aches with the memory of those fragile times, things thick with dust after she put them to the side and allowed herself to forget until now.

Somewhere to her right, something shifts again. Though she smiles a little warmer, a soft crinkling of her nose, Nerys doesn’t need to turn toward it. She already knows who it is.

“You’re awake.” Odo’s voice is particularly rough, the way it always is when he’s readjusting to lips, teeth, tongue, and vocal cords.

“I’m awake,” Nerys confirms, stretches her arms over her head and pushes herself up.

She had been afraid when she first learned he was coming back. Oh, there was the Link to think about, and how it might have changed Odo as much as he changed the other Changelings in it. And then there was herself, an uncounted number of changes in the way she thinks and feels since he left her before, and she’s stronger for those things and that time. Until the moment he stepped through the airlock, smiling in the affable way she remembered so clearly, she hadn’t known how different this would be with him. She has struggled with reality all her life, with things that are more brutal and cold than she wishes they were, so she prepared for the worst, but the reality now is that nothing has changed.

“It’s not quite time for you to wake up for your shift,” he says and the mattress shifts under the weight of his humanoid shape when he sits next to her. Smooth fingers without scars or the creases and ridges that would identify a natural humanoid push her hair from her face. Nerys has grown it long again, now comfortable enough with the face that looks her back in the mirror and all the people she has been that she carries inside herself: child and revolutionary, lover and soldier, traitor and hero.

Her voice is still thick with sleep and she yawns before she speaks, but then she smiles and presses her face into that touch. “I’ve slept plenty.”

“Hardly more than four hours.” Odo’s expression is chiding and his voice is flat, but she simply rubs her nose in his palm. “You’ll regret it.”

“Or drink enough raktajino that I won’t care.” Her laugh is muffled by his hand and Odo makes a soft noise that suggests he doesn’t entirely approve of her poor care of her own well-being. “I’ve gone with a lot less sleep than four hours before, Odo,” she reminds him when all that’s left of her mirth is a warm smile that creases the corners of her eyes.

Odo makes the same grunting harumph sound. “And for once you don’t have to, Nerys. You should sleep.”

“Or perhaps I shouldn’t have been awake so late,” she teases, her fingertips on his knee and marvels at the twitch of response she receives.

When she first met him, Odo could hold the shape of a solid humanoid but had never mastered the minute details that made the experience of solitary form not merely tolerable, but enjoyable. Later, he admitted that with time and study and a great deal of practice, he had mastered some of the other details--the pounding heart, the blossoming network of nerves and blood vessels--and found himself enjoying the shape more than ever before. Changelings, he had been told, were meant to take a shape to understand it, but he confessed that he thought that perhaps he was the first of them to come close to truly understanding humanoids.

“I suppose you’ll be blaming me for that now.” Odo sighs and lay out next to her, one hand on her side, a thumb tracing the curve of her hip. “I can live with that.”

“You had better.” She hides her face with a blanket, which Odo takes from her and tosses to the other side of the bed.

Odo laughs again, something that fills her room as much as he was himself only moments before, something alive that spreads and takes root and makes everything just a little brighter, a little softer. “That’s hardly becoming of you, General,” he murmurs in her ear, pulling another giggle from her when he pulls her closer, all thoughts of banter forgotten easily.

Nerys grins and rolls toward him with the momentum of his force, then on top of him. Her smile stays firmly in place even when her heart swoops with reminder that he’s here, he’s real again, no longer something to conjure in her mind when a peculiar shadow casts itself over her face. Nerys has _missed_ him so deeply that it breaks her heart to think too hard about, but she doesn’t want to change the mood by telling him one more time all the ways she thought of him, even when she told herself it was long-past and best tucked away like memories of the Occupation, or the Dominion War, or a hundred thousand other things.

She doesn’t want that, so she keeps herself from repeating the words she mouthed against his skin when they were alone, knotted together as tightly as two beings ever could be. Odo is laughing now, but when they had held onto each other the night before and said nothing at all after her blurted confession, Nerys had felt that hollow loneliness, as deep and profound as the one from before; the old call of the Link that had eventually taken him home, and now back here again, to her.

The long wait is over, she thinks when her breasts press against his chest and sinks down into him, feels his arms around her back and a fingertip tracing the curvature of her spine, Odo’s huff of amusement when she arches into the familiar touch. Nerys breathes in a fresh lungful of air and sighs it out with a shaking quiver that resonates into him, to her, and then in the air itself.


End file.
